The Dead Series (Book 3): Dead Line (2 page)

Marla shrugged. Shane was right, though he forgot to take into account the speed with which the virus spread. All it had taken was a passenger-flight from LA to New York with one infected passenger, and by the time it landed all three-hundred aboard were undead, including crew. A jail –
Shane's
jail – had become overrun with those godforsaken things in less than thirty-six hours. It wasn't that the lurkers were formidable – far from it – it was the fact that you couldn't escape the rate at which the infection had spread, especially in close-proximity establishments like jails, airports, shopping malls . . .

'It took a long time before people realised they had to destroy the brain,' Marla said. 'Long enough for them to overwhelm us. Stupid, really, but them's the way the cookie crumbles.'

Shane sniggered. 'Them's the way, huh?'

'Yup.'

Shane settled back into his chair. His back was aching, but he had adamantly convinced himself that he would spend the rest of the night at the window. His eyes stung, watered, as they willed him to close them, but he would not be beaten by fatigue; not if it meant missing Megan's possible –
doubtful?
– appearance out front.

'Do you want me to leave?' Marla could sense the tension in the room, despite her many attempts to break it. A palpable air of melancholy had once again descended, and the last thing she wanted was for Shane to resent her for her presence. He was officially mourning the loss of his daughter, and that of his wife. Time alone was a privilege he deserved.

Which was why it came as a surprise when he said, 'No. I would like you to stay, if you've got nothing better to do.'

Marla smiled, brushed the back of his hand with her own. 'Well, I am a very busy lady, but I guess I can afford you the time of day. Just promise me something.'

Shane shuffled in his chair, both his back and the wood beneath him creaked audibly. 'What?'

'No more littering. It really is a turn-off.'

Shane grinned. 'You're some woman.'

She rested her head against the mahogany chair-frame. 'Some,' she said, and within two minutes she was sleeping peacefully.

Shane turned his attention back to the window and the flesh-hungry demons beyond. Sleep, for him, would be a long time coming.

CHAPTER TWO

Terry Lewis placed the bible down and slowly lifted the eight year-old frame of River, who was now sleeping, probably for the first time in days. He smiled as he lowered her gently to the carpet before covering her with a sheet that, before the apocalypse, had been worth thousands. Now, it was just a sheet, something to cover a sleeping child with. Nothing had any worth any longer, at least monetarily.

Terry liked the kid, though. She had something about her. He liked the ways she asked questions . . . a lot. As he had read
Revelations
to her, she had insisted that it pertained to what they were going through, and who was Terry to argue? He'd thought exactly the same thing. He had to smile, however, when she tried to convince him that the devil was not a fallen angel at all, but a sea-monster. “You see,” she'd said in her sweet, naïve manner, “pirates shot the devil with cannons, and he sank like a brick to the bottom of the ocean. When he wakes up, he's gonna be one angry monster.” Terry figured she'd read too much Lovecraft, though it was more likely she got the idea from Scooby-Doo cartoons on Saturday morning television.

'Sweet dreams, River,' he whispered, though he wondered just how she was expected to have such things with everything that was going on around her. The things she had seen; the creatures she had despatched with her very own blade; it was a surprise she was sleeping at all, for her head must have been swimming with horrific images, mind-videos that had no place in such a fragile being.

He couldn't sleep. Not with everything that had happened. In all honesty, he wanted nothing more than to speak with Shane, but the man was broken for the time being. Terry figured he'd come around eventually, but they didn't have long. They couldn't expect to survive in the museum for long; it was only a matter of time before the lurkers managed to get in. River said they'd already been in once, creeping in through the back. She'd almost lost her life that time.

Terry didn't want it to happen again.

'
As soon as Judas took the bread, Satan entered into him
.' Terry didn't know why he said it, but he was on automatic; tired and yet wide awake. He could spend the rest of the night spouting excerpts at random, though they left a bitter taste in his mouth, as if he was biting his tongue as he recalled them. Perhaps it wasn't such a good idea, after all.

There were three doors leading off from the so-called dinosaur-room. It was River's favourite, for some reason or other. Maybe she felt an affiliation with the extinct creatures, since that was what humans were fast becoming. Terry didn't like being surrounded by all the bones – sharp, jutting out as if intent on removing the eye of a passer-by. The majority of the room was off-white, the colour of bone; endoskeletons – some incomplete – stood tall, defeated but proud. As a man of faith – what remained of it, anyway – Terry was reluctant to believe that such creatures had ever existed, and that God had deemed it necessary to obliterate them so malevolently. His beliefs, and his reliance on the texts of the bible, could be wiped clear if he so allowed them to be, and the dinosaur-room was not a place he felt comfort in.

He took the centre-door, which led into a corridor. There were double-doors leading off somewhere else, but Terry didn't want to stray too far from the girl. If she woke to find him gone, disoriented, she might scream or panic.

Admiring the art hanging high on the museum walls, Terry managed to forget – if only for a moment – that he was once again a prisoner. He had escaped Jackson with Shane and Marla, escaped the clutches of that madman, Victor Lord, and his cronies, only to end up trapped in a new prison. The ornateness of the museum was misleading; it was essentially just a pretty jail. There was a lot of stuff to look at, unlike the penitentiary, but there might as well be bars over the windows and industrial bolts across the doors.

Terry wished there
were
. They might die inside, but at least they would die human, naturally.

One painting in particular caught his eye. It portrayed a bearded man grasping at a woman's ankles. She seemed indifferent – and, Terry thought, a little dismissive of the poor bastard. At first, Terry saw just a man being spurned by what was once perhaps a loved one; but the more he stared at it, the more his brain began to twist things, contort them to suit the current climate, and then all Terry could see was a bearded lurker, snapping at the heels of an anguished and bloodied survivor. The face of the man had changed from sorrowful to malevolent; the woman no longer had the countenance of a scorned lady, as her mouth was now a gaping
O
as she struggled to be free of the undead beast beneath her.

Terry blinked, and when his vision cleared everything had returned to normal.

'God help us all,' he said, swallowing hard with what little saliva he could muster.

He made his way back into the dinosaur-room, pushing away the dreadful image of the changing painting, though it hadn't done anything of the sort, not really.

River had shifted ever-so-slightly beneath the priceless sheet which covered her. The bottoms of her muddied jeans stuck out of the end, which reminded Terry of a version of Snow White And The Seven Dwarves that he had once read. She was breathing low and steady, which was a good thing. If she had been whining, or ticking, Terry would have woken her, for they had enough nightmares to worry about in the waking hours.

He sat beside her on the floor, pushing his back up against a marble plinth with a sign announcing whatever extinct bones were on display beside it.

He plucked his bible up from the carpet and began to read.

He managed three pages before the noise came from above; a guttural, mechanical sound that woke River immediately.

'What's
that
?' she asked, her eyes full of sleep.

Terry was up on his aged haunches, listening. 'I don't know,' he said, straightening up. He reached down and took the little girl's hand. 'Come on. Let's go and find out.'

She resisted as he pulled at her arm. '
Wait
.' She reached down and pulled the sheet across. Her machete was there, lying beneath the sheet – of course it was; she grabbed it, flipped it in the air and caught it as if it was nothing more dangerous than a bowling-pin. 'Never go anywhere without it.'

'Good to know,' Terry said, and he meant it.

They raced for the stairs.

Terry hoped it was nothing to worry about, but something told him that the source of the sound would change everything for all of them.

He wasn't wrong.

*

Shane jumped to his feet, his heart thumping inside his chest, threatening to explode. 'Marla!'

She woke with a start, and immediately heard the reason why Shane had so forcefully roused her. A low humming sound from above, and it was getting louder. 'What
is
that?'

Shane was already halfway across the room, his pistol levelled at the door. 'It's coming from the roof,' he said, breathlessly.

Marla rubbed at her eyes, unsure of how long she had been sleeping. It couldn't have been long, for it was still dark outside. An hour, perhaps . . . two at the most.

'Right behind you,' she said, making her way across to the door. 'But, FYI, never wake a sleeping woman, especially when she's having dreams about a certain Mr. Clooney.'

'Clooney's
dead
,' Shane said as he pushed the door wide open. 'And necrophilia, the last time I checked, was illegal.'

Marla sighed and followed Shane to the end of the corridor. The metal staircase there led up.

To the roof.

*

They stood, all four of them, glancing into the darkness that was the night sky. Peppered with stars, it would have been beautiful in other circumstances.

The noise was certainly getting louder. River was clinging onto Terry's shirt, her neck craned so far back that it must have hurt.

'Do you see anything?' Marla placed a hand on Shane's shoulder.

'I know that sound,' he told her. 'And there's more than just one of them.'

'Planes?' Terry said, not quite a question. 'Which means there are
others
.'

Shane was about to respond when three jets roared across the sky. They were in stealth-mode, and barely visible, but the sound was thunderous, and River slapped her palms against her ears and clenched her eyes tight, as if awaiting the aftermath of a nuclear-bomb.

'It's okay, River,' Terry said, stroking the girl's hair. 'It's just noise.' It was remarkable, Terry thought, that the girl was so affected by the racket of three jets, yet could fight a small horde of lurkers with her machete as easily as cutting through butter. She looked up at Terry with doe-eyed innocence, and he remembered, in that moment, that she was just a girl, just a normal eight year-old girl who had seen more of the world and its horrors in the last few weeks than most people suffered in a lifetime.

'What way is that?' Marla pointed in the direction that the jets were flying.

'South, I think,' Terry offered. 'Shane?'

Shane nodded. 'Yeah, that's south. Louisiana way, maybe. There's no real way of knowing where they're going, or why they're flying at this time of night.'

'But it's good news,
right
?' Marla was suddenly hopeful; her voice had lifted a few octaves, and she turned to face Shane, who remained unflinching, morose. 'Shane, tell me you're
pleased
to see those jets.'

He glanced across to where the planes had vanished into the darkness. After a few seconds, he shrugged his shoulders. 'Marla . . . they could be going anywhere. For all we know they're from fucking
Mexico
!'

His expletive shocked River, and she hissed as it fell from his lips.

'Sorry, River,' he said. 'And I'm sorry for treating you so badly.' Though now he was addressing each of them; not just the girl. It was a plea for forgiveness. 'I don't know what you expect me to do, all of you. You want to go chasing after those planes? With those
things
down there – the hungry bastards?'

Marla looked to Terry, expecting him to say something –
anything
. Terry crouched and whispered something quietly into River's ear. She looked up at Shane while Terry spoke softly to her. When he was finished, he tapped her on the shoulder and she began to walk across the roof, towards the door leading back down into the heart of the museum. When she reached it, she turned.

'Apology accepted,' she said, flinging the machete into the air and catching it once again with her usual confidence. She turned and disappeared through the doorway, and only when she was gone did Terry turn to face Shane.

'Look, she's just a kid, despite what we've seen her do, so can we keep the level of cussing down?'

'I just don't know what you
want
from me,' Shane said. He tucked the pistol away in the band of his trousers. 'You honestly think we can go running after those things. What if we don't make it any further than the end of the road? There's too many of them down there. Listen . . . '

They did. Deep, guttural moans filled the night, pierced occasionally by the shrill shriek of a female lurker.

'That's
death
,' Shane said. 'And if we go out there on a wild goose-chase, we'll be like
them
. I guaran-fucking-
tee
it.'

'We stay here, Shane, we'll be dead in a month.' Marla had stepped back, as if she couldn't bear to be in close proximity with the man who they so stupidly relied on. 'Those vending machines will empty pretty quick, even if we ration. Shit, we might fall into sugar-induced comas if we keep eating chocolate.'